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Enzo Biagi (1920 – 2007)
Biagi was born in Lizzano in Belvedere, and started his career as journalist in
Bologna. Active in journalism for six decades and the author of some eighty
books, Biagi won numerous awards, among them the 1979 Saint Vincent prize. He
worked on the Italian national TV channel Rai Uno until 2001.
On May 9, 2001, just two days before the general elections in Italy, during his
daily prime time 10-minute TV show Il Fatto, broadcast on Rai Uno, Biagi
interviewed the popular actor and director Roberto Benigni, who gave a hilarious
talk about Silvio Berlusconi in which he humorously declared his preference for
the other candidate, Francesco Rutelli from the Olive Tree coalition.
Biagi then disappeared from the TV screens a few months after the Berlusconi
declarations in Sofia, Bulgaria, where the then-Prime Minister accused the
popular journalist, together with fellow journalist Michele Santoro and
showman/comedian Daniele Luttazzi, of having made criminal use of the television
service.
Biagi's defenders argue that a public service should provide pluralism, and that
a country where government prevents opposing ideas from being voiced on air is a
régime.
The issue of Berlusconi's motives for entering politics in the first place
emerged in an interview that he gave with Biagi and Indro Montanelli, stating
"If I don't enter politics, I will go to jail and become bankrupt."
On April 22, 2007, 86-year-old Enzo Biagi made his TV comeback on the RAI with
RT - Rotocalco Televisivo, a current affairs show which is broadcast on Raitre.
At the opening of the show, he declared:
Good evening, sorry if I am a bit emotional, maybe it is visible. There was a
technical problem, and the interval has lasted five years.
Until shortly before his death he was also a columnist for the daily Italian
newspaper Corriere della Sera, for which he had worked for since the early
1970s.
(Wikipedia)
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